Workers clear sewerage contaminated sludge in the Brisbane suburb of Fairfield on January 16, 2011. (credit: MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images)Workers clear sewerage contaminated sludge in the Brisbane suburb of Fairfield on January 16, 2011. In Florida, one group wants to turn waste to energy. (credit: MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images)

POMPANO BEACH, Fla. (CBS Tampa) — Believe in the power of poop. It’s an initiative being pushed by one South Florida energy company, which is now on the edge of being approved in Fort Lauderdale to help generate home electricity.

Power Green Energy, a Pompano Beach start-up hoping to turn sludge from waste-water treatment plants into renewable electricity for the state, is awaiting word today from the Fort Lauderdale City Commission to approve a rezoning request that would implement the system by the middle of next year. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports that the company has received the City Commission’s tentative approval to initiate operations that would feed into Florida Power & Light Co.’s power-lines by mid-2012.

“To be able offset energy use for waste-water facilities with renewable energy or renewable gas from the very waste going into the facility in the first place is the optimum solution,” Patrick Serfass, executive director for the American Biogas Council in Washington, told CBS Tampa.

The proposed initiative is another step toward creating additional energy sources for the state, its tentative goal projected at 4 megawatts of electricity, or about 1,000-plus homes powered by the waste-to-energy plan. Currently, similar examples are also taking place in North Carolina and Wisconsin.

“This is taking a negative and turning it into a positive for our environment,” PGE Co-Owner Amie Silverman said to the Sun-Sentinel.

One of the important ideas behind PGE’s waste-to-energy plan stems from the idea of it all, anaerobic digestion. Through this, class-B biosolids from a wastewater facility, containing pathogens and bacteria, are processed through a digester, a vessel used for breaking down biodegradable material. Once the biosolids have gone through the process, they are upgraded to class-A biosolids, free of pathogens, bacteria, and viruses.

Though the digestate system has been in place for some time now, the PGE program signals an enhanced need for greater usage, sharpening the state’s focus on how to grow alternative energy.

This isn’t new – hog farms have had bio-digesters used to capture methane as for decades. It’s usually used to provide fuel fo heating systems, but larger systems have excess capacity that allows the fuel to be used by electrical generating systems.

I watched a film in school in the 1970’s showing entire villages of Chinese farmers who shoveled their swine waste into cisterns which broke down and emitted the Methane which they captured simply by method of a cap pipe and valve. they cooked and heated with it and have been for hundreds of years. Nothing new here Folks. Probably some EPA regulation forbidding Large hog and Chicken operations from being self sufficient in recovering their own energy

Youre absolutly right. This isn’t new. Methane digesters have been around forever. This would work more efficienly in washington though. Put in washingtons poop. Out comes usable fuel, and excellent fertilizer is whats left. And It can be recycled – its the base material of political speeches. It’ll be the only efficient and cost effective thing in washiongton!!

A 4MW generating system will generate 4MW per hour, or 4KW per hour for 1000 homes. If you use more than 4KW hours of energy every hour of every day, then you have to be one heck of a big energy hog. My last electricity bill in CNY showed a usage of 300KW for the month of August. That equates to about 403 watts of electrical energy per hour, per day, for a 31 day month. If you use 4K per hour every day, you are one of the reasons this country is running out of energy. That’s something to really be proud of, isn’t it?

It’s about time! I’ve heard of this possibility for years and now finally….. Sewage sludge has long demanded expensive treatment processes to make it safe for returning to the environment. Other posters have complained that the article exaggerates number of homes supplied. Hopefully the technology will improve.

Sewage is more renewable than oil, easier to get at than coal. For coastal cities (and denizens of their adjoining water) it would be an absolute blessing not to have to dump even treated sewage back into the sea or rivers.

Now if only some company would find a way to convert used cat litter into electricity!

This has been done in Maryland for 3 MW. I was the project manager for a waste gas to electrical conversion project two years ago. It featured three 1-mw Waukesha generators pumping out 4160 volts. Gas conditioning has to be done and it is not simple. Siloxanes in the gas need to be removed or their grit destroys engines. We found a way but it took a year of development with properly skilled people. The gas stream’s flow varies with the rain especially, so the engine control systems have to be flexible and protect the plant from explosive mixtures. I modeled and designed a system which tracked input flow well and kept the plant safe.

We’re talking about solids here, not the liquid portion of the domestic waste which still needs to be sent to re-use sources, wetland treatment areas, held temporarily in percolation ponds, sent to the boulder zone via deep well injection or yes, piped to an ocean outfall.

Until we invent cost-effective treatment systems that can remove an acceptable level of bacteria, viruses, pharmaceuticals and other organic contaminants, we will still keep using the time-tested principle that “the solution to pollution is dilution” along with “out of sight, out of mind”.

A lot of the solids are eaten by specific organisms at the waste treatment plant. Methane gas is the by-product of their eating. What’s left is less toxic. It certainly is not a problem like radioactive waste. Dilution is already there from the water in the sewer system; it’s not further diluted to make it more pure.

But using something to generate energy, does not necessarily remove all the energy from the material. So, basically, what they mean by “renewable energy” is re-purposing materials to generate energy after they have been used for something else. The term “renewable” stands more for how easy it is to get these materials through typical day to day living, instead of having to dig up entire mountains or valleys and such.

It is more then obvious you don’t understand anything from this discussion. Pick up a book please.

Not to rain on the Greenie parade, but I toured a big sewage treatment plant near Boston in 1971. The entire plant was powered by the methane from the digesting sewage, and they sold power to Boston Edison. This is pretty common in major municipal plants. But since this is the obama adimin and their buddies in the press love this stuff, I guess we have to let them reinvent the wheel.

Abel, technically true, but then everything we use now is solar power in one form or another. Bio comes from current sunshine, as does wind and hydro (sun powers the atmosphere, causing rain and wind, and drives photosynthesis. Coal is photosynthesis that happened a few hundred millon years ago. Oil we’re not so sure of,but shale gas is old sea life entombed in limestone. Even nuclear is solar; old stars going nova produced the heavier elements, including the radionucleotides. That’s the radioactive stuff. So yes, eventually once the universe dies a heat death there will not be any more “renewable energy”.

Biofuels might work well in a man-intensive program such as Chinese farmers use but what is the cost of producing energy at this facility which will only produce nergy for 1,000 homes? We have all witnessed the fallacy of ethanol being a cheap way to produce gasoline when in fact it costs more to produce the energy than the supposed savings of not using oil. just as the recent Solyndra scandal has exposed, liberals love to spout the virtues of these projects while wasting billions of tax dollars for projects that end up costing more.

Hmm, someone mentioned a pipeline running out of congress as a possible method to power the country. There could be some merit to this idea, future members of Congress would run on the platform that they could generate enough power to run their district.

Future congressmen would probably be very Obese which would then make the Obese more accepted into society.

Congressional toilets would then be revamped and toilet companies would then advertise with tag lines such as “The Toilinator 3000 helps run the country, preferred by congressmen from 43 states!”

Congressmen would campaign against each other with insults such as “He’s not doing his job! I’ve been eating fiber daily and have even been VOTING while sitting on my Toilinator 3000 in order to do my part in powering the country!”

Trudy, wastewater treatment was one of the best inventions ever for human health. Started with Louis IV and his famous sewers. There is a lot known about the biology of finishing what our bodies started. The last step in many wastewater processes is strong chlorine dose and aeration. One thing about bugs and chemistry, they are predicable. If the plants run according to their process specifications, the effluent is safe. I can see a concern of what happens if some superbug survives the process, but we’d all be dead by now if there were one – it would have surrounded and destroyed us by now. The gas that is burned in engines that generate electricity exhausts at well over a thousand degrees – everything is killed and oxidized.

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